Terry Marotta: What’s funnier than underpants? How about hair

I mean, I give a lot of talks, and I can’t think of a single time where even the word “underpants” didn’t crack an audience up.

Because what makes people laugh in the first place? Let’s ask ourselves that. The proud man brought low and pretension deflated, yep. And people falling down - but not getting too hurt, or else how could you laugh?

And then there’s the incongruous, like the TV ad where an adult male voice seems to be coming from the mouth of an actual baby. And since the funny and incongruous is often also the highly embarrassing, here we are right back at our underpants.

When they appear on the public scene, we die a thousand deaths. We feel the way we did when our mom showed up during math class with the lunch we forgot, whistling the special family whistle out there on the sidewalk to get our attention and – OH NO! -- wearing that old raincoat and SMILING and pointing to the little brown lunch-sack and the DOG is even with her and HE’S SMILING, TOO, as much as any dog can smile with his tongue hanging to the ground and drool running off it like water from a faucet.

Yep. Underpants make us feel that way.

I know my niece still blushes to remember getting up for a second piece of paper during a high school test to discover the wide, white smile of a mysterious second pair plastered by static-cling to her backside. And I thought I’d never get over the time my pants fell down at summer camp, only couldn’t fall really because they were stuck inside my little shorts, so they drooped and fluttered on either side of my legs.

My mother did better under similar circumstances when, striding through the city in the height of the great old era of hats and gloves for all the ladies, she suddenly felt a strange slithering sensation, and there were her unmentionables pooling around her ankles. She stepped out of them, gave a quick backward kick and kept on walking.

And maybe that’s what I would have done the other day and thought nothing of it - IF all I had lost was a pair of undies.

Instead, as I was crossing the town common, my hair fell off. My wondrous cinnamon-colored fake hair that anyone with 60 bucks can buy at the mall.

The whole intricate thing just sort of sighed and let go, much as a squirrel might suddenly die and tumble from his tree. Actually, first it curled at my neck -- as a baby raccoon rescued from the fox might do – and then it slithered down my back and onto the sidewalk.

I couldn’t just scoop it up and go about my errands without it. Of course I couldn’t. Because if there’s a sight capable of making even the pope laugh, it’s the sight of a person’s real hair under such circumstances, caught up in its sad little twig of a bun.

I grabbed that glossy critter, plopped it on my head again and made a beeline for the nearest restroom to make the repairs.

And I don’t know WHO might have spotted me and gotten the smile.

But when I reached the supermarket and told the lady at the register that my hair had just fallen off in the public square, well, the two of us laughed for three solid minutes.

Write Terry care of Ravenscroft Press, Box 270, Winchester, MA 01890, or at tmarotta@comcast.net. To read about more day-by-day adventures, visit her blog, “Exit Only,” any old time at www.terrymarotta.worpress.com.